Flexible, absorbent substrates are used in many everyday items, like tissue items such as napkins and paper towels. Many occasions or events provide for the personalization of such items. For example, personalized wedding napkins can add an accent to the theme of a wedding reception. Personalized wedding cocktail napkins can feature, for instance, the date of the wedding, the bride's and groom's names or initials, or a meaningful quote or expression, and are something that is highly impactful on the wedding reception guests. It can also be highly desirous to have personalized napkins at other occasions and events, like birthday parties, business events, or baby showers, for example.
Generally, in traditional printing systems, the personalization of flexible substrates is limited to a single uniform or static print on the substrate in that the same exact print is repeated on each and every napkin within the print run. Thus, the level of data is non-variable between substrates of the same run or production pass, i.e. it is non-variable data. In the wedding reception example described above, a single production pass can create the napkins for the wedding reception. However, implementing differing details between subsets of the production run of napkins is infeasible without doing a secondary production run. For example, napkins cannot be generated in the same production run for a certain subset of guests (e.g. a groom's friends) that contain unique information, such as a photo or graphic, message or quote directed to the subset of guests with different information for another subset of guests (e.g. the bride's parents). Likewise, a set of napkins, each napkin having unique information, such as the name of an individual guest printed on it, similarly cannot be generated in the same production run.
Traditionally, printed absorbent substrates, such as napkins, are produced either on letterpress equipment using dies or polymer plates, or through the use of flexographic printing, screen printing, or di-sublimation heat transfer. In the case of processes utilizing letterpress equipment, the production of a die or plate is required, which can be expensive to produce for even a single run of printing where all of the printed matter is uniform. Further, in the case of the variable data described above, creating a die or plate for each iteration of variable data is impractical. In the case of the flexographic, screen, or di-sublimation techniques, equipment components also vary, depending on the information to be printed. Additionally, the size of the substrates and desired size of the printed material can vary, even within the materials for the same event or occasion. Beverage-size, luncheon-size, and dinner-size napkins, as well as the printing prior to or after conversion, further affects the equipment used in the various traditional processes. For example, the printing of converted napkins using traditional processes can result in poor printing quality and/or registration and is limited to static print with no means to apply variable data at an economical cost.
Thus, there remains a need for systems and methods of printing on absorbent substrates which can produce a high-quality printed substrate having personalized, varied data between pieces in a single production run.